Critics offer many arguments against raising octopuses for food, including possible releases of waste, antibiotics or pathogens from aquaculture facilities. But as a psychologist, I see intelligence as the most intriguing part of the equation. Just how smart are cephalopods, really? After all, it’s legal to farm chickens and cows. Is an octopus smarter than, say, a turkey?
Octopuses are as smart as they need to be to survive in their highly complex and ever changing environment. They might even be smarter than a human diver in the water, at least in a narrow sense of intelligence within that context they are evolved to be very intelligent. They perceive, predict, and learn very quickly though even out of the water.
I’m unmoved however by the morality of eating intelligent creatures. We don’t yet have a firm theoretical understanding of how intelligence arises in life, and so it is painfully obvious that if we accept that a line can be drawn at some point along the intelligence spectrum, it is necessarily arbitrary.
Being a largely omnivorous species, and suspecting as I do that intelligence exists in animals far more generally than we are comfortable with, then if we’re not talking ourselves into becoming vegan, we should at least confine the moral considerations to outcomes we actually do understand well and care about, such as greenhouse gases arising from food production.
Broadly agreeing, I do have a thought.
Where we lack a clear understanding that allows us to draw a clear line, that doesn’t prevent us from identifying cases that are apart from that line.
We might not know where the line is, but we know mushrooms aren’t close and that chimps aren’t either.
We might not know how far from the line they’re on, we do know which side of the line they’re on.
Sure, pragmatically we can make these choices, but it’s still arbitrary.
I don’t think it is, it just acknowledges the error bars of uncertainty around the non-arbitrarily line we’re yet to fully define.
Any line would be arbitrary without an ethical underpinning on which it is based, the discussion is traditionally philosophical in nature rather than pragmatic - although ethicists are in short supply these days so we must make do.